Wednesday

Jun.
2, 1999

Hillary in Her Glory

Lullaby for a Daughter, and Hillary in Her Glory

Poems: "Lullaby for a Daughter" and "Hillary in Her
Glory," by Mary
Jo Salter, from Sunday Skaters (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

ELIZABETH II, 27 years old, was crowned in Westminster Abbey,
London, 1953, on this day, and claimed her full title: "By The
Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the
Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith." They chose June 2 for the
coronation because forecasters said it of all days was the least likely
to rain. It poured. More than a million people got soaked jamming the
streets and balconies of London to glimpse the golden coach that carried
her and Prince Philip to Buckingham Palace.

It's the birthday in Oak Park, Illinois, 1935, of CAROL SHIELDS,
author of The Stone Diaries in 1993 which won her the Pulitzer
Prize, as well as The Republic of Love (1992), and
Happenstance (1988).

NATIVE AMERICANS WERE GRANTED FULL
CITIZENSHIP on this day in 1924. Congress passed a bill which said
simply, "All non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits
of the United States are hereby declared to be citizens of the United
States."

It's the birthday of BARBARA PYM, Shropshire, England, 1913, author
of comic novels about the kind of upper-middle-class British who live in
North Oxford, of whom she wrote, "There are no sick people there.
They are either dead or alive. It's sometimes difficult to tell the
difference, that's all." Her books include Excellent Woman
(1952), and A Glass of Blessings (1958).

GUGLIELMO MARCONI took out a patent in London on this day in 1896
for his new invention, the radio. At that point he'd been able to
transmit and receive a signal a distance of about 12 miles.

It's the birthday of writer THOMAS HARDY in Dorset, England, 1840.
Though he wrote both novels and poetry, Hardy always considered himself
first a poet; novels were just a way to pay the rent. But the books,
with their gloomy settings and unhappy endings, made him a famous man.
Most of them are set in the imaginary county of southwestern England,
"Wessex," like The Return of the Native, The
Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. His
last book was Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, the story of
two people who leave their spouses, live together and have children. The
Bishop of Wakefield threw the book in the fire, and was able to get some
of Britain's booksellers to pull it from their shelves. Hardy was so
disgusted by this that he stopped novel-writing and only wrote poems for
the rest of his life.

It's the birthday of MARTHA CUSTIS
WASHINGTON, in New Kent County, Virginia, 1731, who was married as a
teenager, had four children, and was widowed when she was 26 years old.
She came into a huge estate, a fact most historians say was not lost on
the young plantation owner George Washington, who courted her in the
summer and fall of 1758 and married her the following January. She
didn't care much for all the social demands of being First Lady, but she
said, "The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our
dispositions, and not on our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the
one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we go."

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Although he has edited several anthologies of his favorite poems, O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound forges a new path for Garrison Keillor, as a poet of light verse.
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